The purpose for the program, Empowering the Base of the Pyramid, is to provide local African organizations with the necessary local and global knowledge and capacity to use innovative business management tools to enhance the efficiency and productivity of their work.

The name of the program is inspired by C.K. Prahald's book, the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.  Prahalad proposes that businesses, governments, and donor agencies stop thinking of the poor as victims and instead start seeing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs as well as value-demanding consumers.  Slum Doctor Programme believes that community based organizations in Africa can utilize innovative management tools and the internet to co-create solutions to poverty with their members, businesses, governments, and donor agencies by employing Prahalad's principles of DART, Dialogue, Access to information, Risk vs Reward and Transparency.

SDP pioneered use of the sophisticated business tools by community based organizations with Busoga Shinning Light Association (BSLA) in Uganda.  Initially SDP gave BSLA a grant to supply AIDS Widows with seeds, fertilizer and training in production, post harvest handling and marketing of maize with the intent of increasing household incomes for the AIDS Widows and their children.  From the humble beginnings of a grass roots HIV/AIDS education project, BSLA grew into an organization that combats the impacts of HIV/AIDS with integrated programs in HIV/AIDS education, agriculture, and savings & credit. 

The model combines use of the balanced scorecard tool for strategic planning and monitoring of key objectives with an information, communication, technology (ICT) architecture, an online accounting system, and a procedure for documenting appropriate internal financial controls.  The model is based on the principles of co-creating solutions to poverty with dialogue, access to information, a mutual understanding of risk vs. reward by all parties, and transparency.

Paul Barkley from SDP and Nathan Magumba from BSLA collaborated on developing this model from each of their experiences with community development in Uganda coupled with technological improvements with computers and internet, and examples of innovative projects in other developing countries.

First we clarified the governance roles of the members, board, key management and staff.  Then we created a culture of accountability and transparency through basic accounting procedures. From there we identified the mission, values and long term vision of BSLA. We created a set of  realistic and measurable strategic objectives to guide our path to the vision.  The objectives are balanced across four perspectives; stakeholders, internal processes, learning & growth and financial. 

We use the ICT system based on Google Docs to monitor the measures of success for each of the strategic objectives.  Some of the measures are financial and other measures are non financial.  To track the financial measures we created an online accounting system in Google Docs that features live links supporting documents for each journal entry and ongoing updated financial statements that are always available for internal and external audits. 

We use a comprehensive approach to internal financial controls or risk management.  The goal is to understand and manage the risk that the contributions of the members, staff, donors and lenders might be diverted from effectively achieving the overall mission.  We are now starting to document and implement appropriate control procedures with in the context the control environment or tone at the top and a ranking of the individual risk factors.

After many years of struggle on a shoestring budget, the effort is beginning to show results, with trust from a growing group of small scale farmers, respect and the request for consultation from neighboring  farmers organizations and national development programs.